Chapter Two

Zoe

 

At first I couldn’t see anything but a hazy rainbow—maybe the after effects of the psychedelic bathroom-mirror-portal-thing I’d been sucked into. Then the swirling colors faded and I found I was looking up into five faces—at least, I thought they were faces. They certainly weren’t human faces though, that was for sure. Maybe they were demons? That would make sense although they didn’t look like any demons I had ever seen. Also, the floor I was lying on was cold—like freezing. Wasn’t Hell supposed to be hot?

I blinked groggily and had a blurred impression of dull silver metal walls surrounding me.

“Where am I? Is this Hell?” I croaked.

“The Pure One wakes,” one of them announced in the high, piping tones I recognized as the Disney character voice I’d heard before. Great, I’d been dragged into the afterlife by the demon version of Bambi. Or something that sounded like Bambi, anyway—it sure as Hell (pardon the pun) didn’t look like him. None of them did.

Ten bulging purple eyeballs on long stalks studied me with apparent interest. The eyes were connected to long, slender blue bodies that looked like some mad scientist had decided to grow three foot long earthworms and dye them indigo. They weren’t completely worm-like though—they each had multiple pairs of arms with long, claw-like fingers.

Fingers that were currently reaching for me.

“No…no!” I gasped, trying to roll away from them. “Get away from me!”

“Be cautious! The Pure One is agitated!” Bambi squeaked and the worm-like demon creatures slithered hurriedly out of my way, obviously not too eager to be squished into worm pâté.

Suddenly, I saw the Devil again. He leaned over me and I froze at once, startled to see his handsome, horned face staring at me upside down.

“Be still,” he commanded. “Tazaxx doesn’t take damaged goods and I’ve already spent most of my reserves buying your ridiculously expensive hide. I can’t afford another Pure One.”

“Another what?” I demanded, trying to sit up.

“At least you look the part,” he remarked, his golden eyes roving over my body. “Those curves—Gods, no wonder the Ancient Ones wanted your pitiful little planet protected. You’d have been raided eons ago if every female on your world looks like you.”

“I…my…what?” The way he was looking at me made me feel naked. Then I looked down and realized I was. I was completely nude—butt-nekked to borrow a phrase from my very Southern grandma.

Not only was I naked, I was lying there on display like some kind of pale freckled, red-headed buffet for the Devil and all his minions to feast on. Well, if he was the Devil. Some of what he’d been saying had penetrated my foggy brain and I was beginning to have my doubts about that, despite the red skin, golden eyes, and horns.

I had no doubt about covering myself, though. I pulled my knees up to my chest and crossed my ankles tight. I own my curves but I’m still shy about showing them off in the nude—especially to a Devil-looking man who had just dragged my ass through a mirror and was eyeing me like I was some kind of Victoria’s Secret angel sent just for him.

“There’s no need to hide yourself,” he remarked sarcastically. “I’ve already seen it all—you’ll be most pleasing to Tazaxx. To any male, for that matter.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded, lifting my chin.

He seemed awfully tall and big but maybe that was just because I was huddled on the ground and he was looming over me.

“Are you the Devil? And is this Hell?” I asked, needing to make sure. “Because if it is, I swear I didn’t mean to take those socks. If you’ll just return me to my home I promise I’ll dig them out of my sock drawer and take them back right away. I’ll pay double what they cost—triple even.”

The Devil frowned at me, his luscious, cruel lips twisting with the expression. Which raised yet another question—was the Devil supposed to be hot? I mean, in the sexy sense—not the actual temperature sense like all of Hell was supposed to be hot. Oh God, I was rambling, even to myself. I was in so much trouble here…

“What is she talking about?” he asked someone I couldn’t see. “She’s not making any sense.” He stabbed a finger at one of the blue worm-like creatures. “You told me the transfer process wouldn’t hurt her mental ability. I need a perfect specimen. Tazaxx won’t trade for an idiot—not even a fucking gorgeous one.”

“I believe, Master, that the female is referring to an Earth religion,” a crisp voice that put me in mind of a proper English butler, stated. “The religion says that those who do evil are sent to a region called ‘Hell’ after death to pay for their sins. There they are persecuted by a fallen deity who torments them forever in a lake of fire.”

“I would hardly call shoplifting socks ‘evil’,” I protested. “I mean, wrong, yes but evil—no. At least, not enough to get dragged down to Hell. Which I’m guessing this is not?” I added hopefully.

The Devil—(or not-Devil? Now I didn’t know what to call him)—rumbled laughter.

“No, little Pure One, this is not your Hell. Look around—do you see any lake of fire?”

“N-no,” I admitted.

“Then what would make you think this is your version of damnation?” he asked, his deep voice sounding genuinely confused.

“I believe, Master, that would be due to your…ahem horns,” the proper butler voice said.

I looked around—where was that voice coming from? There appeared to be a tiny golden insect sitting on the not-Devil’s broad shoulder. But could such a tiny thing speak?

“My horns? You have a problem with my horns?” The look on his chiseled features darkened—the amused expression sliding away from his handsome face. His cat-eyes glowed an even more brilliant gold for a moment and he seemed to get even bigger somehow. His skin got even redder and the scowl on his face made him look absolutely terrifying.

I gave a little squeak and scooted away from him as well as I could. Unfortunately, my bare butt seemed frozen to the cold metal floor so I didn’t get too far. What I wouldn’t give for some panties—even some big old cotton granny panties would do. In fact, they would be great—they would help me slide instead of sticking to the damn floor! Okay, my mind was going on a tangent again. This was bad. Really bad.

Calm down, Zoe, I told myself. Keep it together, girl. It’s going to be okay. This is probably just a bad dream. A really, really vivid nightmare and you’re going to wake up any minute.

I hoped, anyway.

“Master, I could be wrong, but if I read the elevated heart rate and respiration of the female correctly, I believe you are frightening her,” the proper voice said. “Quite badly in fact.”

“H-he’s right,” I whispered, trying to make my voice sound normal and failing abysmally. “Y-you’re scaring the ever-loving crap out of me, to be honest.”

“Forgive me.” He straightened up a little and his eyes stopped glowing. “I thought you were making a reference to my parentage. I forgot—you know nothing of my kind, just as we know almost nothing of yours, as your world has been isolated for so long. Very well then, little Pure One. I am not a fallen deity. Or a deity of any kind. I’m just a half-breed smuggler who picked you from the AMI.”

“The…the AMI?” I asked, feeling my heart rate start to go back to normal now that he wasn’t glaring golden daggers at me.

“The AMI—The Alien Mating Index,” piped up the worm creature I had dubbed Bambi. “We are an agency that specializes in finding and procuring only the most elite females. Only those that were seeded with hidden talents by the Ancient Ones are found and taken. Our database has millions of candidates on Earth alone and is growing daily as new abilities are being discovered and new and luscious females come of age to be harvested. Males come from all over the galaxy to see what we have to offer and—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” I said, holding up my hand. “Stop the sales pitch. Did you just say you’re running some kind of an alien dating agency here? Because I don’t remember signing up to be matched with any kind of alien, okay? So there must be some mistake—if you’d kindly just take me back to Earth—”

“Impossible,” twittered Bambi in his high, squeaky voice. “You have been chosen as the prime candidate by his Eminence, Lord Sarden. He has commanded that you be transported and has paid your contract price in full—we never remit such a payment unless just cause is found.”

“Lord Sarden?” I said, staring up at the not-Devil guy again. “Lord of what? Lord of who?”

He shrugged, his impossibly broad shoulders rolling with the motion.

“Don’t pay any attention—that’s just how the Commercians talk. Obsequious little bastards, always looking to turn a credit.”

“But Master,” interrupted the proper butler voice. “You would be Lord if you would claim your rightful place. If you would only—”

“That’s enough, A.L.,” Sarden snapped.

“Forgive me, Master.” The golden insect on his shoulder—which looked a little like a dragonfly—fluttered its glittering wings in agitation.

“Forgiven. Just keep your mouth shut.” Sarden looked back at me. “Basically what they’re saying is that I paid for you and you’re not going back.”

“What?” I demanded, sitting up straighter. Forgetting I was naked, I put my hands on my hips. “You paid for me? You can’t do that! I’m not for sale!”

“You most certainly are—this whole planet is. Now that the lock put on your world by the Ancient Ones is being dissolved, your entire world’s female population is fair game.”

“Lock? Ancient Ones?” I shook my head—I was getting more and more lost.

“The ones who seeded your planet millennia ago,” Bambi said helpfully. “They traveled across the universe, planting the seeds of life on only the worlds they considered the most deserving. Their DNA lives on in many sectors but only on a few, rare, specially selected worlds has it been preserved in its purest form.”

“And the ‘lock’ they put around your planet is what I believe you Earthlings refer to as an ‘ozone layer,’” said the proper butler voice, which seemed to be coming from the golden dragonfly. “Now that much of it has been removed and your planet has begun to heat, outside investors are free to harvest Earth’s females. Females such as yourself, who are most valuable because they have not bred with any of the other peoples of the known universe. This is why we dub you ‘Pure Ones’—because you have only the pure blood of the Ancient Ones running through your veins.”

Forget about the Ancient Ones and all the crap he was spouting about ‘Pure Ones’, my mind snagged on something else the butler voice had said.

“The ozone layer?” I stared at the not-Devil guy, aka Sarden, in mounting disbelief. “Are you saying that me being abducted is a result of the hole in the ozone layer? I got snatched because of Global Warming?”

He shrugged again. “If that is what you call it.”

I wanted to laugh but I clamped down on it, knowing what came out of me would be more like a scream.

All the environmentalists and climate change people had tried to warn us. They said that the ice caps would melt…that the seas would rise…that all the polar bears and penguins and puffins would die…They never freaking said we’d be abducted by alien bride hunters, though!

I bet more people would have sat up and paid attention if someone would have mentioned that little tidbit of information. I know I would have run my AC less in the summer and carpooled to work to keep from being snatched by aliens. I was betting a lot of other girls would too. But who was telling them? Nobody, that’s who. So now they were fair game for this crazy AMI organization.

Thanks for nothing, Al Gore.

“The moment the hole in your ozone layer was wide enough, the Commercians moved in, as they always do with newly harvestable planets,” the butler voice which Sarden had called “A.L.” informed me.

I was beginning to think the voice coming from the dragonfly sounded like a cross between C-3P0 and Jarvis, the mechanical servant in the Iron Man movies. It sounded damn strange, coming from an insect. But before I could answer, it continued.

“The Commercians injected your atmosphere with trillions of tiny viruses—some for universal translation so that brides from your planet might understand their future mates, some for immunization that our alien pathogens would not infect or kill you, some for surveillance so that every female may be watched in any reflective surface, and some for transportation—which process you have just undergone. Then they opened their base for business.”

“Hold on—go back,” I said. “Did you say any reflective surface?”

The dragonfly fluttered its jewel-like wings.

“Indeed. Surveillance and transport viruses work together. They are silicone based life forms which are able to live in glass, metal…even water.”

“So you’re watching every woman on Earth every time she checks her lipstick or does her hair?” I was horrified at the idea. Freaking peeping-Tom-pervert aliens!

“As you see.” Bambi made a gesture with one of his many clawed hands (come to think of it, he looked more like a centipede than a worm) and a large screen made of golden light suddenly appeared behind him. My heart caught in my throat when I saw who it was displaying.

Leah was standing there with her phone pressed to her ear, talking rapidly and looking worried. The angle we were looking at her from seemed strange and her image was elongated and distorted but I could still see her long waterfall of silky brown hair and her big, brown eyes as she spoke.

“Fix distortion—switch viewing area,” Bambi commanded in his squeaky, innocent-sounding voice.

At once, the angle changed and we appeared to be looking at Leah from the side—as though we were staring in through the small window of the break room at her work, I realized.

“What…how were we looking at her before?” I asked, aloud, my mouth as dry as cotton. “You said, any reflective surface, right?”

“The scanner picks the first reflective surface it can find,” Bambi explained. “This was our initial viewpoint.” He pointed one clawed hand at the curved, silver side of the toaster which was sitting on the counter in front of Leah.

“Oh my God,” I muttered. “And I thought it was weird that you dragged me through the bathroom mirror. Now you’re telling me it’s not even safe to make toast?”

“Any reflective surface can be used for viewing and transport,” Bambi assured me. With another wave of his clawed hand, another image came into view.

I bit my lip—this time it was Charlotte but she was upside down.

“Switch viewing area,” Bambi said again.

The view changed to a more normal look and I saw that Charlotte had a half-empty Greek yogurt container in front of her and was toying with a silver spoon as she spoke on the phone. A spoon—so that was why she had appeared upside down! Not only was it not safe to make toast, yogurt was out too!

Breakfast was never going to be the same again.

Charlotte looked as worried as Leah had. As always, her thick, wavy blonde hair was confined in a tight, no-nonsense ponytail and her sharp green eyes were intense as she spoke into her phone—no doubt she and Leah were discussing what had happened to me and what they should do about it.

I felt my gut twist.

“Those are my best friends—please, you have to leave them alone!”

“We will leave them in peace,” Bambi promised.

“Oh, thank you,” I whispered, but my relief was short lived.

“At least until a customer comes who wishes to buy them,” Bambi finished. “After all, both are Pure Ones and either or both might have hidden gifts from the Ancient Ones—it is difficult to tell without further testing.”

“You leave them alone!” I snapped at him. “And better yet, send me back to them. They’re worried sick about me already—can’t you see that?”

“Regrettably, your former life and friendships must now be left behind,” Bambi informed me. He made a gesture and the screen made of light that showed Charlotte’s face disappeared as if it had never been there in the first place. “Currently you are no less than three hundred miles above the surface of your planet on our base.”

“Your base? Is that where I am?” I looked around again at the plain metal walls and floor. There was a row of what looked like holographic lights blinking in one corner. Was that some kind of control panel? It looked about the right size and height for the worm-like Commercians to use, though Bambi hadn’t needed it to show me the light screen and my friends.

“Their base is a ship orbiting quite close to your planet,” A.L. informed me. “It’s quite easy to conceal amidst all the space junk you have floating in your outer orbit. Your people certainly seem bent on being harvested—it appears that you dissolved the lock the Ancient Once put around your planet yourselves.”

“Yeah, right, whatever,” I muttered, feeling like a scolded child. “I guess we did. But we had no idea there were aliens looking to abduct us as mail order brides!”

“How could you not?” Bambi asked in his piping voice. Now that I’d been watching him for a while, I realized he looked different from the other Commercians—his wormy hide was a slightly lighter shade of blue. “For the past fifty to seventy Earth years or so we have been testing our transfer equipment by abducting one or two Earthlings every year and then returning them,” he informed me.

I looked at him in horror. “So all those stories about being taken by aliens are true? Not just crazy people saying crazy things?”

“I am afraid so. We had to test and perfect our equipment, after all.” Bambi shrugged—or what I assumed was his version of a shrug. His wormy body rippled with the gesture.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “But in all those stories—or most of them—the abducted people get…get probed.” I looked at Sarden quickly. “You’re not going to…I won’t let you! I’ll fight every step of the way if you try to stick something up my…”

I trailed off, finally registering the look of amusement on his sharp features.

“No, no—please go on.” He made a sweeping gesture at me with one big hand. “Where exactly did you think I wanted to, ah, probe you?”

“Never mind,” I said grumpily, seeing he was laughing at me. Clearly some of the crazy abduction talk was just that—crazy.

“The captured Earthlings were probably referring to our sensitivity tests,” Bambi informed me, making me feel nervous all over again. “We are required to run certain examinations to be certain that our subjects are healthy and that the transportation process did not injure or mutate them in any way.”

“Mutate them?” I looked down at myself, wondering if I had grown a third nipple or an eleventh toe or something awful like that.

“Don’t worry,” Sarden rumbled, giving me that annoying, sardonic smile I was beginning to really dislike. “You’re fine.”

“Technically we cannot say that for sure until she is tested,” Bambi pointed out.

“No—no tests!” I insisted, trying to keep my chin up and my voice strong. But the awful reality was, if they wanted to test me—to probe me—they could. There were too many of them and I was just one naked, unarmed Earth girl.

God, what I wouldn’t give for the little canister of mace I carried around in my purse right now! Or maybe Charlotte’s taser—she was attacked once, back in college and now she doesn’t play around. She will straight up taze a guy if he comes at her in any kind of threatening way. I wished she was here with me now to taze the big, red son of a bitch alien who was smirking down at me.

Speaking of the red son of a bitch, he seemed to read my mind.

“No need to fear, little Pure One—no one will be probing any part of your lush body. Though I confess it’s a tempting idea,” he murmured. “You’re safe enough while you’re with me. Of course after I trade you, I can’t say.” He shook his head. “You’re even more beautiful than your image on the viewer. It’s a damn shame to trade you to Tazaxx.”

The way he was eyeing me made me realize I was exposed—my arm had slipped and one of my nipples was peeking out at him. I readjusted quickly, but I was damn tired of feeling at a disadvantage just because I was naked.

“Listen, you’re going to have to stop talking like that because you can’t buy or trade what’s not for sale,” I said, glaring up at him. “Now give me some clothes and let me go home because you’re not trading me to anyone. Read my lips—you don’t own me and I am not going with you!”

It’s hard to make a point sitting down while the other guy is looming over you. I started to struggle to my feet—not easy with one arm locked in a death grip over my ta-tas and the other shielding my lady-bits.

“Here.” Sarden reached down a hand to help me up. My impassioned little speech didn’t seem to have fazed him at all. Not surprising since he apparently thought he held all the cards. Well, to be honest, he pretty much did, I had to admit to myself. But still, I’m no quitter! I wasn’t going to let him just steal me away and march me off to some Godforsaken planet where—

My thoughts cut off abruptly when his big hand made contact with my skin for the first time. I felt a shock of something like electricity go through me—a jolt that seemed to sizzle through every nerve in my body. It raised chill bumps over every inch of my skin and made my nipples into two painfully tight points.

“Ah!” I gasped, stumbling back from him and nearly falling.

“Gods!” he growled at the same time, jerking his hand away. Whatever the weird jolt was, clearly he had felt it too.

“What…what was that?” I gasped, standing shakily, still trying to cover myself.

Sarden didn’t answer me. Instead, he looked at the blue wormy Commercians.

“You didn’t tell me when I picked her that she was a La-ti-zal! Quick—get an inhibitor on her—now.”

“A what?” I demanded but the wormy little aliens were already snapping some kind of bronze metal bracelet around my wrist. I looked down at the band and saw it had a little window on it that had glowing, incomprehensible symbols jiggling across it.

Great, I was wearing the Alien version of a Fitbit.

I could imagine the readout now—You’ve already gone three hundred miles today, just a few million more into outer space and you’ll reach your abduction goal! Har-har, very funny.

The strange jolt I’d felt was still making me tingle in the most uncomfortable places. And it appeared to be affecting my captor too. Sarden was pressing his thumb and fingers to his closed eyelids and rubbing like a man trying to drive back a migraine.

“Gods, the colors I saw,” he muttered. “Whole spectrums of light…” Looking up at me he said, “Your hair—it’s the color of flames. And your eyes…I’ve never seen anything so blue.”

“Um…okay,” I said carefully. “Are you just now noticing all that? Look—what just happened anyway? What was that word you called me before you jerked away like I was a hot stove?”

“A La-ti-zal,” the proper butler voice informed me and the golden dragonfly fluttered on Sarden’s shoulder. “One especially bred by the Ancient Ones to have extra gifts. They are very rare and valuable. A tingling sensation during first contact between such a gifted one and one of another of the Twelve Sentient Peoples she is sexually compatible with is normally the sign of a La-ti-zal. Which is, I believe, how Master Sarden ascertained your abilities.”

“Which is good. It means Tazaxx will have to make the trade. He won’t be able to resist her.” Sarden straightened up and I saw for the first time how truly immense he was.

Earlier I’d thought that he just looked big because I was sitting and he was standing—but it hadn’t just been a trick of perspective. This alien was huge. He had to be seven feet tall at least, I estimated. In fact, the top of my head barely came up past his elbow and his shoulders were easily twice as broad as mine. He was muscular too but not in a gross, over-the-top, ropey-veiny way. He just looked incredibly cut and intimidating, standing there in his tight black trousers and his black sleeveless t-shirt looking thing.

With his incredible abs, neatly clipped mustache and goatee, and those intense golden eyes he looked positively mouthwatering. If you’re into Devil worship, that is, which I most certainly am not.

But hot or not—and he was, most definitely huge and hot—I didn’t like the way he thought he’d bought me and he was already planning to trade me away.

“She’ll do,” he said to Bambi who was watching, his stalk eyes wide. “I’ll take her back to my ship at once since our transaction is completed.”

“Negative,” Bambi protested in his piping voice. “You paid only enough credits for a standard Pure One—an Earth basic female. The charge for an elite La-ti-zal is much higher.”

“Then you should find a way to test the females and be sure of what they are before you sell them,” Sarden growled. “All sales are final—it says so in your own brochure.”

For the first time, I noticed he was wearing a large, chunky silver ring with a black stone on the middle finger of his left hand. He made a motion with it and a holographic display, showing all kinds of Alien symbols I couldn’t read, appeared and started scrolling through the air.

“There—see?” he said, pointing to a bit of floating green text that looked like squiggles and lines to me. Apparently the translation viruses the aliens had sent down through the hole in the ozone layer only worked for spoken communication. I was on my own if I wanted to read something.

“This is true,” Bambi agreed, sounding very unhappy about it. “But we have been meaning to refine our testing for some time. If you had not come so early, we would have had time.”

“So now you’re complaining that I’m your first customer?” Sarden raised one arched black eyebrow at him. “You shouldn’t have opened for business if you weren’t ready.”

“You must at least allow us to perform the sensitivity tests,” Bambi exclaimed.

“Well…” Sarden appeared to consider the idea. “It would make trading her to Tazaxx easier if I had a certificate of sensitivity on file.”

“Very good.” Bambi made a motion and two of the wormy Commercians slithered away only to return with a large contraption that floated through the air between them, guided by the lightest touches of their long claws.

I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to freak out and scream. The weird machine the Commercians were bringing looked like a high-tech version of the Iron Maiden I’d seen in a Medieval museum once. It had a padded upright table with straps on one side to hold the victim in place. The other half, which was clearly meant to close over it and trap the victim inside, was a bristling mass of needles and wires with sparks coming out of them.

Worse even than the awful instruments of torture I saw sticking out of the second side of the upright table, was their placement—they appeared to be clustered into three specific areas. Studying them, I was certain if they strapped me to the table, those needles and wires were going to be aimed straight at my breasts and crotch. Which, I think we can all agree, are the areas you specifically don’t want needles and sparking wires making contact with.

Great. I was about to be the star of an alien torture porn film.

“Is…” I had to clear my throat before I could get the words out. “Is that going to hurt?”

“Oh, yes—of course. It should be quite excruciating, in fact, as long as all your nerve endings are intact,” Bambi said cheerfully, as though he tortured girls just for fun every day. As far as I knew, he did. Who knows what gets an alien centipede off?

A low humming sound filled the air as it got closer and I could feel the short hairs on the backs of my forearms standing up as though I was in a room with an immense generator. My heart was pounding so hard it seemed like it was trying to get out of my chest and run away—which was pretty much what I wanted to do. But one look at Sarden’s long, muscular legs told me he would catch me before I got three feet from the torture table. My only hope was to change his mind about letting the Commercians test me.

“No,” I whispered, my voice almost too dry to speak. “No, please.”

But the other four Commercians already had their long, chitinous claws on me and were dragging me over to the table. They pushed me back against the cold, padded part of the table which felt like some kind of slick plastic against my bare skin. They forced my arms down by my sides and I felt my cheeks grow hot with embarrassment as my breasts and the small patch of red curls between my thighs was revealed. Oh God, if this was a nightmare, I needed to wake up now!

“Please,” I begged, looking at Sarden, feeling so scared I was sick to my stomach. “Please don’t let them do this to me. I don’t like shots or sparks or being electrocuted. I promise I’m really sensitive—you don’t have to test me to know that.”

He frowned but said nothing.

“Ready the testing subject,” Bambi declared in his high, piping voice. “Start with one hundred volts and continue from there until maximum pain threshold is reached.”

“No!” I gasped as the other side of the table started moving towards me. I could see the silver needles gleaming and the wires were spitting sparks in my direction with an ominous sizzling sound.

I couldn’t believe this was actually happening. How could I be hiding in the restroom bitching about my boss to Leah and Charlotte one minute, and strapped to an alien torture table about to have my ta-tas and coochie pierced and electrocuted the next? I wished like hell I was back in the office brewing yet another pot of coffee for Dayton Lauder the third and listening to him yell-talk while he waved his arms and wafted his awful BO everywhere.

Suddenly having a stapler thrown at my head didn’t seem so bad.

This has to be a dream! It has to be a dream!

But so far I wasn’t waking up.

“No, you can’t!” I heard myself begging shamelessly. “You can’t do this to me!”

Forget suffering in silence, I’m much more of a plead-for-my-life-at-the-top-of-my-lungs type of gal.

“Please!” I cried again, through a throat that had grown so tight I could hardly get the words out. My eyes were stinging with unshed tears and I felt like my heart was going to gallop right out of my chest. Every nerve in my body was on edge, ready to feel the pain. The tip of one bright, shiny needle was just about to poke my right nipple (my right boob is slightly perkier than my left. Don’t tell me you don’t have one that’s just a little perkier—I won’t believe you. Everybody does.)

Anyway, as I was saying, I could feel the cold, sharp tip of the needle just about to pierce my nipple…

And then Sarden barked, “Stop!”